Phoenix of Ice
by Anaxn
Summary: "I've seen your handiwork." Was the first thing she said to him. It confused the berserker. No one else he had encountered even tried to speak with him. No one but this woman, locked in an empty house, who had watched his destruction of her city.
1. Phoenix of Ice: Reverse

Phoenix of Ice: Reverse

"I've seen your handiwork." Those were the words that greeted him at the top of the stairs. No fear, no begging for mercy, no praying. Just a cold, calm observation. He found this interesting.\  
"It's almost beautiful, the way you fight. Even your own Heartless edge around you. A whirlwind of death." He stared at her, letting his claymore rest point first in the floor as he commited her image to memory. She was devestatingly ordinary, long dark locks just like the rest of this world's inhabitants, midnight purple highlighting her hair where the dull sun shone on it from the wide window beside her. Besides the wooden chair she was seated in, the rest of the room was barren, the house simply a wooden shell.  
"What saved me?" The young woman asked, turning to face him, and he was not surprised to see that her eyes were black onyxs, cut flat to keep even a glimmer of light from escaping. They contrasted well with her pale skin.  
"Luck." He deadpanned, emphesizing this by driving the point of his claymore into the floor with the sound of splintering wood, but remaining where he was. "Luck that will not save you anymore." She gave an imperceptible nod and resumed staring through the dusty glass.  
"I thought so. You are ruthless." Another statement of fact, with quiet conviction and assurance behind it. Not a question or assumption about a man she had never seen before. Just fact.  
"It took a while to get through the city and the heartless only picked up on your scent once we were nearly finished." He found it odd that he was speaking with his prey, but there was something around her, like a current or undertow, as though she were the center of a vortex or sinkhole that not even the smallest detail could escape.

"What is your name?"  
"Saix." She continued to stare out the window, which he was thankful for; he was not sure he could meet her eyes again without some sort of repercussion on his side.  
"Did you come from a world like this?" Her voice echoed, sonorous and full in the empty shell.  
"Sort of. We were much less advanced when I lost my heart."  
"I see." He moved his gaze to the window for a moment, wondering what she was staring at, and realized with mild interest that she could see most of the city from her window. She must have watched the slaughter of her people from here.

"They thought I was a seer, a prophetess." The raven-haired woman said, rubbing her long sleeves and resettling the lengthy dark blue dress she wore around her knees. The fabric seemed rough, Saix realized, and uncomfortable. He found himself unconciously smoothing his own leather trench coat. "They believed that the words I spoke would become true in some fashion, that I could see the future and tell them."  
"Could you?" He asked, a faint tone of amusement and derision coloring his voice. He was called the Lunar Diviner for a similar reason. When he had first been found by Organization XIII, he was mad; he babbled insanely and without stop for quite some time. But many of the things he had said were true and did become true and once he regained his sanity, he was given his rank and title, neither of which he understood at the moment. The woman laughed lightly, the echo of ancient scorn in her voice the first sign of emotion he recognized in her.  
"Of course not. Such powers do not exist in this world. Seeing you makes me think it may exist in other worlds though." Her quiet voice seemed to fill the room with its echoing and ominous tone. Her black eyes turned on him again and for just a moment, Saix remembered what it was like to feel fear. It was not hard to see how people would follow her words and believe she had powers beyond those of everyone else. Then her face turned to the window again and the lunar element regained his senses.

"Shall we finish this game of cat and mouse then?" She calmly whispered, a question he grappled with for a moment, trying to understand the implications behind it.  
"One thing before that. What is your name?" She seemed amused, her face approaching an expression similar to the one Zexion assumed when tackling a new puzzle.  
"What does it matter? I am the final piece in a concerto of destruction. I am no more than a minor detail."  
"You have captured my interest." He drawled haughtily, knowing he was laying it on a bit thick. "I want to see what will become of you. If you survive, then your name matters. If it doesn't, your name shall be like that of the rest of your people. Forgotten." Again she smiled cryptically.  
"You know I shall not suvive."  
"There are other existances than this one." She cast him a sideways glance, her eyes like the darkness of the sky of The World That Never Was; full of mystery never to be told, such bleak resignation to a life of nothing and only vague interest at what was going on below itself.  
"Arisa."  
"Good." He commanded, lifting his claymore and gripping it with two hands. He finally began to advance, feeling somehow that he was now part of her vortex, part of the whirlwind she had attributed to him earlier; A feeling of doomed motion encircled him and the edges of his vision began to blur as though at high speed. Her eyes locked on him for a moment, blackness empty of any emotion, even of fear, then her eyes closed in resignation and her body stilled.  
"Just don't take too long." For just a moment he was tempted to drag it out, to torture her just to see how she would react, but something in him threw the idea aside in disgust. Then he swung his claymore across her shoulder, driving the point and blade through bone and flesh, and for once she screamed, a cry like all of the pain of life realeased in one moment. It echoed in the empty space, then faded away into the soundlessness of the gutted world.


	2. Phoenix of Ice: Rebirth

Phoenix of Ice: Rebirth

The red brought color to the room, Saix realised with some satisfaction, and her body, seeped in its own blood, brought life to the shell. He stood for a moment, like a single mourner who arrived late and stands over the grave of the one he will never see again. Then the black wisps began to rise and Saix watched with a mix of remembered pity and present satisfaction as the atrocious mists swirled around her head and body until they obscured his view of her entirely. He knew that her heart would not be satisfied with leaving.

He waited until she stirred, lifted her head, looked around for a moment without recognition and fingered her new clothes. They fit well, he thought. Her simple blue-black dress had become, in part, a billowing white skirt, lapping around her knees in the front and pooling on the ground in voluminous curls behind her bound and slippered feet. The bodice of her dress was a dark turquoise, tightly fitted around her chest with an opposing pair of crescent moons in the center of it. Lines of stars topped the ribbed sections, fading from turquoise to pale blue where the bodice ended in wisps of cloth. A heavy jem hung at her throat where a large section of cloth had been cut to reveal her pale skin, like a harvest moon above a winter field. An appropriate ensemble for her, Saix thought.

He even marveled at her hair, once black tinged in purple, now red like the dried blood on the walls, its darkest color almost black. She stared at him and he realized with a shudder that her eyes held the same quality of depth as before. Black was now replaced with a green so pale as to be called transparent, like the rainbow off the sheen of a knife blade.

"You are empty," She stated in a voice like the depths of the ocean, filling the room with promises of nothing-left-behind. She paused for a moment, putting a hand to her chest. "Just like me." Saix smiled, realizing with little regret that he had given himself a wound that would never heal and always know that it was hurting him. He would have laughed, had he a sense of humor, for he knew that her Nobody, just like her, would never bother to stop the pain. How hilarious this would be if he had a heart.  
"You are Xasira." He intoned, passing his hand in front of the glowing letters before her. "Your title shall be the Callous Oracle." She frowned, lighting chasing itself across her eyes.  
"I don't like it." Her voice again echoed like thunder on the horizon and he smiled back at her as he began down the stairs.  
"I knew you wouldn't."


End file.
